Okian Warrior sez:In the mean time, feel free to send your kid to public school. Mine is home-schooled and I want to give him as much of an edge as possible. No, really: send your kid to public school, do us all a favor. This problem will sort itself out in a generation or two.

That is a bit harsh. It sounds like you would like to grind up other people's kids to feed yours. While it might be great if every family was like yours and could provide a good home school environment, that is not currently the case. Indeed, if it were the case, you would lose your edge so I guess it is to your advantage that public education be as crappy as possible.

So if China was two countries, everything would be fine, since each country would only put out 2/3 of the C02 of the US, while maintaining their 1/3 output per capita. The way to solve climate change is obviously to divide up the big countries into smaller countries:)

Mass Overkiller writes: "Just read an article (ok just read the majority of an article) regarding your court appointed lawyer. The Massachusetts Judicial Supreme Court ruled that defendants must prove they are indigent in order to receive a court-appointed attorney. The court goes on to say that financial assets of your spouse, girlfriend and/or parents will be considered when deciding whether you are "unable to afford an attorney". Is this a violation of your 5th amendment rights? If I get arrested and need an attorney, is it my parents responsibility to provide financial assistance? What about my girlfriend? My spouse, I suppose, would be legally obligated to help fund my lawyer, but a non-legally-binded girlfriend? What does slashdot think of this?"

RO83RT writes: Wikipedia, the world's largest and online encyclopedia, has surpassed four million articles after more than a decade of work from people like you. Wikipedia is the largest centralized source of information on the web (Google is just a knowledge aggregator, not a source). Congratulations to the internet for such a large accomplishment.

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Christian Science Monitor reports that tests carried out at the Institut de Radiophysique on Yasser Arafat’s final personal belongings – his clothes, his toothbrush, even his iconic kaffiyeh — found that there was a high level of polonium inside his body when he died suggesting Arafat may have been poisoned with the same radioactive element that Russian agents used to kill Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Polonium is a rare element, hard for anyone but a national government to get its hands on and dangerous to handle. "Its presence on Arafat's belongings is certainly suggestive," writes Dan Murphy. "But it's also not out of the realm of possibility that it was added to his effects after his death (though, again, it's very difficult to obtain). Only if his body is exhumed — carefully, under supervision by professionals guarding against tampering — can suspicion congeal into fact." Suha Arafat, who was 27 years old when she married the 61-year-old Arafat in in 1990, told Francois Bochud, who heads the Institute of Radiation Physics in Lausanne, Switzerland that she'd kept the clothing and other items tested at her lawyer's office in Paris until early this year, when she asked Al Jazeera to have the items tested on her behalf. Now Suha is calling for the Palestinian Authority to exhume Arafat's body for further testing. "When Arafat died there was an avalanche of speculation that it was foul play," writes Murphy. "If solid evidence does emerge he was murdered, after a proper autopsy is done, then a storm could start to break.""

MrSeb writes: "A team at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have genetically engineered a microorganism that converts carbon dioxide into isobutanol and 3-methyl-1-butanol, both of which could be used as a fuel source for cars, or other combustion engines. Called Ralstonia eutropha H16, the bacterium uses electricity to fixate carbon dioxide into alcohols (which are merely carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen arranged in a different order). In theory the hydrogen atoms could be produced by solar panels, but for safety reasons the team instead created formic acid using electricity, and then the bacteria feasts on the formic acid to produce alcohol. Ultimately, what the UCLA researchers have built is an electro-bioreactor that turns electricity into liquid fuel — which in a world that wants to use electricity instead of gasoline, but where the infrastructure just isn’t there yet, this bacterium could be the perfect stepping stone. Imagine a car that converts CO2 into fuel as it drives along, either as a hybrid setup or as the primary power source. It also opens up the possibility of near-infinite fuel cells that could replace lithium-ion batteries."

Trapezium Artist writes: Four friends apprehended exploring the disused Aldwych station in London's Underground are faced with an "anti-social behaviour order" (ASBO) which would forbid them from talking to each other for a full 10 years. The so-called "Aldwych four", experienced urban explorers, were discovered in the tunnels under the UK's capital city a few days before last year's Royal Wedding and the greatly increased security measures in place led to their being interviewed by senior members of the British Transport Police. Nevertheless, once their benign intentions had been established, they were let off with a caution. However, following an accident caused by another, unrelated group of urban explorers in the tunnels a few months later, Transport for London applied to have ASBOs issued to the Aldwych four. These would forbid them from any further expeditions, from blogging or otherwise publicly discussing any exploits, and even from talking with each other for the 10 year duration of the order. One could argue about the ethics of urban exploration, but this nevertheless seems like an astonishingly heavy-handed over-reaction by TfL.

An anonymous reader writes: The fight over Internet surveillance legislation has generated massive
public attention in Canada with the government now indicating
that it is "parking" the bill for now. While many believe the bill is
beyond
repair and should be scrapped, it is not going to die anytime soon.
With that in mind, Michael Geist has posted 12
amendments that are needed
to begin to address the massive public concern with the legislation.

ve6ay writes: According to the homepage on Bibliotik.org — a popular site for ebooks and other digital reading materials, they are shutting down effective immediately, due to the risks involved.

From their homepage: "Bibliotik has shutdown all operations. We are no longer able to assume the risks involved. The staff would like to apologize for the sudden (but necessary) decision and thank everyone that participated and made Bibliotik such a great place for so long. We love you guys!"

adeelarshad82 writes: Despite the fact that terms '3G' and '4G' are used relentlessly to sell phones and tablets; to an average consumer they are the most mysterious terms in the mobile technology dictionary. In an attempt to explain these, PCMag's mobile analyst sheds some light on the history of the technology, discusses some misconceptions and explains when to go for 4G and when to buy 3G phones.

ananyo writes: The origin of multicellular life, one of the most important developments in Earth’s history, could have occurred with surprising speed, US researchers have shown. In the lab, a single-celled yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) took less than 60 days to evolve into many-celled clusters that behaved as individuals. The clusters even developed a primitive division of labour, with some cells dying so that others could grow and reproduce.

Multicellular life has evolved independently at least 25 times, but these transitions are so ancient that they have been hard to study.

The researchers wanted to see if they could evolve multicellularity in a single-celled organism, using gravity as the selective pressure. In a tube of liquid, clusters of yeast cells settle at the bottom more quickly than single cells. By culturing only the cells that sank, they selected for those that stick together. After many rounds of selection over 60 days, the yeast had evolved into 'snowflakes' comprising dozens of cells.

Many single-celled organisms, including yeast, often form clumps of genetically distinct cells. But Ratcliff’s snowflakes were made up of genetically identical cells that had budded off and stuck together. Many other multicellular organisms may well have evolved through a similar 'divide-and-stick' process.

Skuto writes: At yesterdays linux.conf.au Browser miniconference in Ballarat, Australia, Mozilla engineer Nicholas Nethercote gave a detailed presentation about the history of Firefox's memory consumption. The 37 slides-with-notes explain in gritty detail what caused Firefox 4's memory usage to be higher than expected, how many leaks and accidental memory use bugs were tracked down with Valgrind plugins, as well as the pitfalls of common memory allocation strategies. Current work is now focused on reducing the memory usage of popular add-ons such as AdBlock, GreaseMonkey and Firebug.Required reading for people working on large software projects, or those who missed that Firefox is now one of the most memory-efficient browsers in heavy usage.